Kamala Harris Is Not the Catholic Candidate

T hose who find this presidential election’s two major-party candidates dissatisfactory can now count the pope among their number. “Both are against life,” Pope Francis said of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris earlier this month. Without naming either candidate or suggesting a preference, he advised American Catholics to vote for the “lesser evil.” It’s a familiar formulation, though striking coming from the man in charge of the institution against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.

On Wednesday night, a group of Catholic Democrats assembled to make the case for Harris as the lesser evil — though they did not, and would not, put it that way. These “Catholics for Harris” are only one of the many Zoom-facilitated, identity-based groups the Harris-Walz campaign has rallied to its banner. Harris-opposing Catholics such as myself might be interested in how our co-religionists are attempting to sell her as the “Catholic” candidate — and in the many problems with their pitch.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church identifies charity as “the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.” In the interest of charity, it is worth beginning with the strongest claims of these professed Catholics. They are right that the Catholic Church transcends any one political party. As Alex Nason, Irish American and Catholic coordinator for the Harris campaign, put it, American Catholics are “not defined by a single partisan organization.”

It is thus also the case that neither political party can lay a full claim on religious sanction for all of its policy preferences. Nason referenced a politics oriented toward the “common good,” which the Catechism defines as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” This leaves much up to political deliberation, specific circumstances, and particular situations.

In economic matters, for example, the Church rejects both top-down and laissez-faire extremes. “Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds; regulating it solely by the law of the marketplace fails social justice,” the Catechism reads. Church doctrine on various hot-button issues, including environmental matters and immigration can — and should — challenge political conservatives. Concerning the latter (the basis for the pope’s designation of Donald Trump as anti-life), speakers were not without basis to highlight some of the Trump campaign’s rhetoric about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. “We have to respect human dignity in all forms,” Anthea Butler, a professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, rightly stressed.

The Catholics for Harris began to go off the rails, however, when they violated Nason’s own counsel that no partisan organization defines the church. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.) was most guilty of this. DeLauro summoned a truly staggering array of thinkers, including “friends” at the witchcraft-invoking Yale Divinity School and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, in support of her positions. She castigated her Republican colleagues for not getting on board with every welfare program Democrats support, for wanting to cut federal spending on some, and for even desiring tax cuts. “We should be feeding the hungry,” DeLauro charged. “Instead [Republicans] want what they always want.” In a stereotype-defying move for a Catholic, she also wondered where these policy preferences are in the Bible.

It’s true: You will not find the Republican Party’s platform in the Bible; not even the Trump Bible contains it. But the Democratic Party’s platform is not in there, either. The Catholics on this call were unwilling to bring to workaday political debates on matters of taxing, spending, and regulation the same humility that Catholics like me are willing to. Their unsubstantiated assumption is that the Democratic Party platform is the de facto fulfillment of Catholic doctrine.

But are top-down, bureaucratic, centralized federal programs always the best way that “we” — note the stolen base, common on the left, of failing to distinguish between the state and society as a whole — can help the needy? Might subsidiarity, the principle (defined in the Catechism and elsewhere) by which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good,” come into play? At the very least, “we” should discuss and even debate this.

Beyond such matters, however, the house of the Catholics for Harris is increasingly built on sand, as they must reconcile obvious violations of church teaching with their beliefs and actions. Former Indiana senator and U.S. ambassador Joe Donnelly, in the course of praising the characters of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, said nothing of the U.S. embassy to the Holy See’s decision to fly Pride flags in June, a blatant offense to a church that still recognizes marriage as a sacrament between a man and a woman.

Penn’s Butler worried about a second Trump administration in which “religious freedom” might deteriorate. Is the professor unaware of various overtures against religious expression that Harris has undertaken as California attorney general, senator, and vice president? And Butler fretted about “the manner in which gender and identity and all of these other things will be upturned by what would happen if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do not get elected in November.” Does she know that the church decries what Pope Francis — often selectively cited by the call’s participants — calls the “gender ideology” by which sex is treated as a mutable characteristic and not an ordained part of God’s created order?

A discussion of Catholics about Kamala Harris must inevitably confront abortion. Some tried to maneuver around it. DeLauro, who was happy to invoke her faith to justify bigger government, demurred that “we’re all people of faith, but that doesn’t mean we impose our faith on others or our interpretation of our faith on others.” In other settings, she has stated outright that “the fundamental tenets of my faith compel me to defend a women’s [sic] right to access abortion.” Butler tried to elevate the other issues of the election such that it was, in her view, untenable to be a “single-issue voter” in light of them. But only a nun, Sister Simone Campbell, had the forthrightness to declare that “our faith does not require the outlawing of abortion.”

I had enough Catholic schooling that it always makes me a bit nervous to be on the wrong side of a nun. But Sister Campbell ought to consider that the availability of abortion is a live issue in our politics, and that in every area where its expansion is a possibility, Harris has been egging it on. Some of Sister Campbell’s fellow nuns have fallen victim to the pro-abortion fanaticism Harris is hardly alone on the left in embodying. Not for nothing was abortion the reason Pope Francis described her as “against life.” And he was fully consistent with church teaching in doing so. Catholics cannot forbear making the restriction of abortion a political aspiration. “The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation,” the Catechism reads.

Were these Catholics for Harris a group of pro-life Democrats, a wholesome coterie of Dan Lipinskis with whom I differed on certain policies but with whom I could agree on the church’s foundational truths, I would have no choice but to contest earnestly with them in the political fray. But such people are now rare in the Democratic Party. The attempt by those who remain to reconcile their faith with what Harris believes is woefully deficient. That this election has supplied imperfect options (to say the least) ought not to lead us into the temptation of distorting our faith in service of our politics. Evil lies down that road, and it is far from lesser.